Artery

• Photo by Courtesy Warner Bros. Entertainm — © 2012 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

“Argo was far and a way the most-mentioned film on our critics’ ballots,” SEFCA president Philip Martin said. “While there were other films that had more first place votes, Argo was consistently well-regarded by our membership and it ended up winning the poll by a comfortable margin.”

In a much closer race, actor-director Affleck was named Best Director over Kathryn Bigelow, whose Zero Dark Thirty edged out Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln for the second spot in the critics' poll.

Daniel Day-Lewis became the first three-time winner of the group’s Best Actor award for his performance as the title character in Lincoln (Day-Lewis previously won the award for his work in There Will Be Blood in 2007 and Gangs of New York in 2002). Jennifer Lawrence was named Best Actress for her turn in the dark comedy Silver Linings Playbook.

Director Ben Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild was the overwhelming choice for the group’s Gene Wyatt award, given annually to the film that “best evokes the spirit of the South." Richard Linklater’s Bernie finishing second.

• courtesy of Warner Bros.

CLOUD ATLAS
**** stars
Opens Friday

My best friend from childhood, a ravenous science fiction reader, has been bugging me for several years to pick up David Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas. Since my friend once read every Hugo Award winning novel ever written (in a single year, on a dare), I try to pay attention to his recommendations. But I never got around to it.

I wish I had. Cloud Atlas has been adapted into a fierce, visionary and deliciously baffling sci-fi epic from co-directors Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and the Wachowski siblings (The Matrix). For fans of speculative fiction — the polite term for science fiction that dares to take itself seriously — it's the must-see film of the year.

Cloud Atlas tells six different stories in parallel, spanning several continents and centuries. Three of the stories reach into the past: San Francisco in 1973; Cambridge, England in 1936; and a ship at sea in 1849. The fourth story is set in present-day London, and the final two take place in the future — Neo Seoul in 2144, and an unspecified post-apocalypse setting long after that.

The central characters in each story are different, of course, but they seem to be recursive versions of the same people, in a way that suggests notions of reincarnation or karma. The characters are played by the same ensemble of actors, including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving and Korean actress Doona Bae. By way of makeup and digital effects, the performers switch ethnicity and even gender between story lines.

Crosscutting between multiple stories in parallel is a tricky maneuver, but as a visual medium cinema has ways of accommodating this approach. Two stories, that's manageable. Three stories is pushing it. Six stories? Insanity.

• courtesy of CBS Films

THE WORDS
** stars
Opens Friday

In 1922, Ernest Hemingway's wife Hadley was traveling from Paris to Switzerland by train when she made a rather historic mistake. Getting up briefly to buy a bottle of water, she left behind a suitcase containing virtually all of her husband's fiction writing up to that point. When she returned, the suitcase was gone. It was never recovered.

That's one version of the story, anyway. Hemingway's lost suitcase is part of our literary lore, and it serves as the inspiration — I use that word loosely — for The Words, an achingly dull film that seems a lot longer than its hour-and-a-half running time.

The movie begins in the present day with a public reading by author Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid) from his new novel, also called The Words. As Clay reads, we flash into the story of his book, which is about another author, Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper.)

In Clay's story, Rory is an aspiring novelist in New York City whose first book has been rejected by every publisher in town. This isn't surprising. As played by Cooper, Rory doesn't inspire confidence. He's a self-absorbed sort, with an adoring wife (Zoe Saldana) and a dad (J.K. Simmons) who's footing the bills while Rory indulges in his artistic struggle. (“I have to pay my dues!” Rory whines. “No, I have to pay your dues,” says dad.)

Rory's problems are solved when he discovers an old manuscript tucked away in a vintage leather briefcase. The story, set in postwar France, brings poor Rory to tears — it's clearly a work of genius. After some rote dilemma-wrestling, Rory submits the story as his own and quickly wins fame and fortune.

Inevitably, Rory is confronted by the actual author of the story, an understandably bitter fellow referred to as The Old Man and played by Jeremy Irons. Sitting on a park bench, the Old Man tells Rory the story behind his story, and we flash back yet again to 1940s Paris.

So, to recap: The film is telling us a story about Clay telling a story about Rory hearing a story from the Old Man, who wrote the story. And I didn't even mention the bit with Olivia Wilde as a sexy grad student.

The good news is that by this point you'll be far too bored to get confused. The direction, by the newcomer team of Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, is surprisingly inert. Dramatic things happen in The Words, but there's no real drama. The contemporary scenes are draggy and bland, and the sepia-toned flashback sequences are too stagey to pack any emotional punch.

The casting doesn't help, either. Cooper doesn't come across as a tortured writer; he comes across as a handsome actor playing a tortured writer. Irons has similar problems, and he's further hindered by bad old-age makeup. Quaid seems mostly disinterested.

On the plus side, the script has some interesting elements of historical intrigue, and you can play spot-the-Hemingway-reference to pass the time. Zoe Saldana brings weight to the few scenes she's afforded in her bystander role.

The movie perks up a little toward the end. The ambiguous final scenes suggest a thread that would tie all three authors together, but only if you don't think it through too far. It doesn't work, but it almost works, and in a movie like this, you have to take whatever you can get.

• courtesy of eOne Films

COSMOPOLIS
* star
Opens Friday

It must have seemed like solid math at the time: Cerebral director David Cronenberg (+) postmodernist writer Don DeLillo (x) ascendent movie star Robert Pattinson (=) edgy art film with box office potential.

Sometimes, the numbers just don't add up. Cronenberg's tedious and talky Cosmopolis, adapted from DeLillo's novel of the same name, is a real disaster. For long and frequent stretches, the film seems to forget it's a film at all. It plays like an audiobook at double speed, with torrential dialogue and nothing to look at.

The preternaturally handsome Pattinson helps a little in that regard, I guess. He plays billionaire Eric Packer, a 28-year-old power broker of information and money. Packer spends most of the movie inside his tricked-out limousine/office, which comes equipped with space age display screens, expensive vodka and a retractable toilet.

Packer has just lost his fortune while his limo is hung up in Manhattan traffic, thanks to some vaguely Occupy-style protestors and the funeral procession of a famous Sufi rapper. As his empire crumbles, Packer holds court with advisers and other visitors, and has sex with some of them. He disembarks a few times, to consult and have sex with others. He also meets up with his new bride, but she won't have sex with him.

That about sums up the action of the movie. The rest is dense, interminable dialogue as the limo crawls along. Dialogue may not even be the right word. It's more a series of cryptic, declarative sentences about … well, I don't know what. Some examples:

“Money has lost its narrative quality. Money makes time; it used to be the other way around.”

“I have a severe anxiety that my sex organ is receding into my abdomen.”

I realize it's unfair to list quotations like this out of context. But that's the thing — they're not out of context. They're stated just like that, sprinkled into rapid-fire exchanges that go nowhere at all.

Cosmopolis does have some interesting moments. Appearances by Paul Giamatti, Juliette Binoche and Samantha Morton lend occasional focus. I liked the bit about the voice-activated handguns. And the wordiness sometimes piles into interesting shapes about information sickness and pathological consumerism.

But there's no way into this thing. Pattinson, looking blank and queasy throughout, isn't up to the task of leading the audience through Cronenberg's chilly universe. And the ending is just more talk, only now everyone is pointing guns at one another.

I didn't buy into a word of this film, and there are a lot of them not to buy into. This stuff might work as a prose poem (or a Don DeLillo book). But it sure doesn't work as a movie.

• Photo by Patti Perret/ Warner Bros.

To really enjoy The Campaign, it’s best to be a) a Will Ferrell fan; b) a Zach Galifianakis fan; or c) from North Carolina. It isn’t surprising that this comedy about small-town candidates battling to win a seat in Congress is set in the Tar Heel State (by way of Louisiana, with filming taking place before N.C. state lawmakers added $60 million in filmmaking tax incentives this year). Ferrell’s parents hail from Roanoke Rapids and he still has relatives living in Cary. Galifianakis was born and raised in Wilkesboro and attended N.C. State University. Moreover, Nick Galifianakis, Zach’s uncle, was a three-term North Carolina congressman who lost the 1972 election for U.S. Senate to a former television commentator named Jesse Helms, a campaign marred by slogans denigrating Galifianakis’ Greek heritage: “Jesse Helms: He’s One of Us.”

Thus, there’s sneaky significance behind a seemingly offhand remark that the racist father of candidate Marty Huggins, played by Galifianakis, is a GOP heavyweight who once worked as a political operative for Helms. So, too, in the specter of Marty, the town and family eccentric with a heart of gold, pitted against an opponent skilled in the dark art of mudslinging.

Marty is recruited by two wealthy brothers and industrialists (John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd) to run against four-term congressman Cam Brady (Ferrell), a superficial politician armed with a sculpted coiffure and crowd-pleasing stump speeches about “America, Jesus and freedom.”

Marty, a Southern dandy working as tourism director for the fictitious burg of Hammond, undergoes a makeover led by his shadowy campaign manager (Dylan McDermott). Gone are Marty’s cardigans and twin pugs, replaced by a chocolate lab and a golden retriever that “test well.” His house décor is soon replete with guns, Bibles and mounted deer heads.

The Campaign finds its satirical groove during a series of absurd attacks that nonetheless ring uncomfortably true in today’s political environment. Cam insinuates that the mustachioed Marty has ties to al-Qaida, while Marty trumpets a canyon-colored short story Cam wrote in grade school about a fantasy land where "everything is free" as proof of the incumbent's Marxist leanings.

Ferrell applies his oblivious blowhard shtick to what’s essentially a John Edwards parody (infidelity included). Meanwhile, Galifianakis channels an effeminate manner and lilt that’s a dead ringer for character actor Leslie Jordan. Yet, as the candidates’ tricks become dirtier, so does the film’s content. The ceaseless profanity has little purpose other than to explore the reaches of an R rating. Every woman in sight is a whore or gold digger. And you don’t have to be a red stater to be put off by a gag that conflates sexual innuendo with a line from “the Lord’s Prayer.”

Despite a svelte 85-minute running time, the by-the-numbers plot peters out even before it segues into a contrived climax. Any movie that pads screen time with cable news talking heads playing themselves is already out of things to say—seriously, have Chris Matthews and Wolf Blitzer qualified for SAG cards?

Ferrell and Galifianakis’ outsized personalities, as well as the only known instance in cinematic history of both a baby and dog being punched in the face, can sustain the film only so far. Indeed, the real-life political dots are far more fascinating to connect than any on screen. Otherwise, when it comes to The Campaign, to borrow Marty’s slogan appraising the current state of politics in Washington, D.C., it’s a mess.